Why I’m so excited about SoloCon 2022

I am very excited about the second-annual SoloCon that will be held virtually on March 8th and 9th, with 4 new hands-on workshops the 10th. SoloCon is our customer and technology conference that focuses on application networking with service mesh, modern API gateways, eBPF, GraphQL, and much more. 

Last year (SoloCon 2021), a few of our customers like T-Mobile, Vonage, and Pega discussed their large-scale deployments of service mesh and modern API gateways. We heard how they run 100 clusters of Istio, how to build a modern API infrastructure with Envoy proxy and Gloo Edge, and how service mesh and gateways come together. This year, we’ll have even more customer use cases from companies like USAA, and Carfax, some returning ones like T-Mobile, as well as some awesome keynotes from recognized industry leaders.

Here are three things I’m super excited about for this year’s SoloCon, and as practitioners of service mesh and gateway modernization, you may find interesting also:

Customer Stories and Partners

At Solo.io, we are the leaders in service mesh and modern API gateway solutions, working with hundreds of customers including the largest deployment of Istio and Envoy in the world (10s of thousands of Kubernetes clusters!). We have proven you can replace outdated legacy API Management infrastructure, like Apigee and Kong, with more modern, cloud-native service mesh and gateways based on Envoy proxy and deliver real business value. We feel it’s best you hear from our customers directly about their journey and successes and we’ve invited developers and architects from the following companies to tell their story:

• USAA
• Constant Contact
• Carfax
• Chick-fil-A
• Snyk
• T-Mobile
• Schneider Electric

Alongside our customers, we often work with the major cloud infrastructure companies like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat, AWS and more. We also have engineers from GCP and AWS speaking about how our Istio based service-mesh and modern Envoy-based API Gateway products complement their cloud offerings. See the full schedule on SoloCon.io.

Keynotes from industry leaders

We will also hear from two prominent leaders in the cloud-infrastructure space in our keynotes. We are excited to have Solomon Hykes, founder of Docker, discuss the challenges of microservices and some of the next challenges in the cloud-native space that we are working on here at Solo.io. We also welcome back Louis Ryan, one of the three founders of the Istio project (Sven Mawson and Shriram Rajagopalan the others) to give us his thoughts on service mesh and the surrounding ecosystem.

New Workshops

I’m super excited that we will also offer four brand-new, hands-on workshops (some with certification) for SoloCon ’22 focused on eBPF, advanced Istio, GraphQL, and enterprise Istio use cases. Let’s take a quick look at each:

• eBPF workshop – We are offering our first in a series of eBPF workshops for networking engineers. This workshop will teach you the basics of eBPF including writing your own eBPF programs. At the end we are offering a free certification exam to evaluate your understanding of the fundamentals taught in the workshop
• GraphQL – Offering GraphQL natively in your API gateway is a huge win for our customers, and in this workshop we explore our GraphQL engine built into Envoy Proxy that allows you to declaratively expose GraphQL schemas and federation without having to write a single line of code!
• Advanced Istio – We take our extremely popular Istio workshop series (over 10,000 attendees in the last year!) and extend it to advanced use cases like Istio upgrades, canary rollouts, multi-cluster, and tenancy. This workshop also has an optional/free “Advanced Istio” certification exam
• Enterprise Istio – After working with hundreds of our customers adopting Istio in production, we’ve learned a lot about how organizations tend to deploy and automate Istio and in this workshop, we bring a lot of that learning to the forefront with Gloo Mesh v2 and an improved Istio operational and end-user experience.

Come join us in three region-friendly times (Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe) for the keynotes, sessions, and workshops starting March 8th!